An inside look at Wichita’s former downtown library; it’s nicer than you remember
Supporters of a petition drive to force Wichita to vote on whether to tear down historic buildings have gotten a rare look inside the former Central Library, one of the buildings they’re trying to save from downtown redevelopment.
And they like what they saw.
Gone are the bookshelves that blocked sightlines while the building served as Wichita’s main public library.
What remains are huge open spaces with floor-to-ceiling windows offering scenic views of the Century II Convention and Performing Arts Center, the former Carnegie Library and the Garvey Center.
“This is a great space, it’s just phenomenal,” said Robert McLaughlin, a Kansas City architect and preservationist who came to Wichita recently to document the building’s attributes as he prepares a case for its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
“I haven’t been in this building in 35 years,” said McLaughlin, who studied it as an architecture student and later was a patron when he worked in Wichita in the 1980s. “It’s very much like I remember it.”
The 53-year-old building and the 51-year-old Century II next to it stand squarely in the path of progress.
Both will be slated for demolition if the City Council approves a plan by downtown boosters who want the space for a new $1.2 billion project, including a new convention center, performing arts center, green space, apartments, offices, restaurants and shops.
Opposing the plan is a group called Save Century II, which is circulating petitions for a ballot measure that would require a public vote to tear down historic buildings owned by the city. Both the Century II and the old library are included by name in the proposed initiative.
A little more than two weeks after starting the petition drive, they’ve collected about 4,000 of the 12,554 signatures they’d need to put their initiative ordinance on the ballot, said Save Century II leader Celeste Racette. They have about five months left to collect the rest.
“Look at these beautiful views; oh my gosh, how could we tear this down,” Racette said , standing in the sun-drenched open area where the fiction books used to be shelved.
The library building has been vacant for about a year and a half, since the opening of the new Advanced Learning Library at Second and Sycamore.
Signs dangle from ceilings showing where particular types of books used to be, while letters on the wall outline former sites of special collections and technology centers.
There are gaping holes in the carpet, showing the outline where bookshelves used to be. Installers from who-knows-how-long-ago apparently laid carpet up to the edges of the heavy shelves rather than try to move them.
The windows don’t seem to have been cleaned since the building was shut down and many passersby have drawn graffiti in the dirt on the glass with their fingers.
But Racette says with a good cleaning and relatively minor improvements, the library building could be transformed into some of the most desirable office space in Wichita.
“I would love to work in a building like this,” Racette said.
She said the area as it is now captures a period of Wichita history spanning across three centuries; from the Wichita-Sedgwick County historical museum (built in 1890) and the former Carnegie Library (1915); to the Central Library and Century II (1967 and 1969).
If the library is demolished, “You know what they’re going to put in here is a box, maybe with a facade that might be interesting, but basically a box,” she said. “Look how unique this is. Do you think they’d build anything that’s going to be even half this unique.”
The Riverfront Legacy Master Plan group, which is proposing to redevelop the east bank of the Arkansas River, hasn’t said what style of buildings it wants to brings to the site. The plan that will go before the council in about a month is focused on function, location and finance, with architectural styles yet to be determined.
McLaughlin said the former library is a prime example, possibly the best in Kansas, of the “brutalist” architectural style.
It isn’t that the structure is brutal in the ordinary sense of the word. The term’s actually an Americanization of the French term “beton brut,” which means “raw concrete,” McLaughlin explained.
Rather than covering up the structure with smooth drywall, the brutalist style highlights the natural texture of poured concrete, picking up the imperfections from the wooden forms used to shape it.
“It’s more honest (than finished walls), even more ‘democratic’ was a term they used at the time,” he said.
Many architects and preservationists have dropped the “brutalist” label from such buildings because it is so popularly misunderstood, McLaughlin said.
“They prefer the term ‘heroic architecture’ because of its monumentality for public buildings,” he said.
The Wichita library actually bears a striking stylistic similarity to Boston’s City Hall, which was built about the same time, McLaughlin said.
In fact, he said there’s still kind of an ongoing argument in architectural circles over who stole what from who.
While the Wichita library was approved and built first, Boston was in the midst of a design contest at the same time and the Wichita architects would almost certainly have seen pictures of the entries.
